Week 8

Two weeks ago there was a total lunar eclipse. Did you have a look at it? It was spectacular, especially when the moon was totally covered by the earth and you could see it like a dark red ball.

These are some photos we took from our house back verandah.
Congratulations to Marta for her podcast. She recorded it and edited by herself! You can listen to it in Let's Talk.

Congratulations to Lisa too for her page in our Kogarah & Liverpool wiki. She was the first student to create her ownpage in the wiki without any assistance! Summer has also published her own page and told us about your excusion to Bundeena. Well done!

Today you can continue working on your wiki pages and the world map.

Other work to be completed:

• Forum: old forum: Marion's topic on gender roles & ESOLforum: quickly add a topic or two to talk about.

Check this vodcast (videos) site out: Living English . It's like a TV series and there are about 4o episodes. The level of language is not very high. Every episode has some listening exercises and grammar explanations. The best thing of all: it's Australian!

Listen to Lois talking about her earliest memories

Now listen to Aaron about growing up as a kid in Australia

Think of your own memories and childhood. Prepare a talk about it. We will record it in class.

Visit this website and do the punctuation exercises on commas. They will help you with your writing.

Check your Webquest answers with me and publish them in you in your blogs if you want.

Agricultural show & Winner of What country is this?

Today we'll concentrate on speaking practice and learning how to use Audacity.

Some of you wanted a tutorial on basic blog functions. You can find a tutorial, Adding links and images on the right sidebar. It is a video that you have to download to your desktop. If you want a printed version, you can read/print this worksheet on how to add pictures or this one on how to add links.

Before we start with Audacity, listen to your very first podcast in Let's Talk: Introductions from Semester 1, 2007 FT students. William's students are going to listen to it and they may even try to send us recorded messages. Read his instructions here. It's very exciting, isn't it? Good work!

• Later we'll correct the language of our Forum. Thanks to all the participants. It was very interesting to read your thoughts on such an important topic (multiculturalism).

• But first....... IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!

We've got 2 winners of our picture guessing competition, What country is this?. The first absolute winner is Marta and she is not even in our class! Marta used to be in Marion's class last year and had her own blog with links to our class blog. That's how she heard of the guessing challenge. You may remember her from her visit to the computer room last Tuesday. She's been working at this for days. Read her emails or post entries below.

The other winner is Dan from our class. He's also been working very hard at trying to find the answer. I think he enjoyed the ride and we may ask him to set up a pictorial guessing game for us, as he is such a good photographer.

Please read Marta's emails and blog entries from the past 2 weeks.

Congratulations, Marta!

These are links to your blogs, including Dan's blog, with the answers you gave:

Burcu's
Winnie's
Sharon's
Lei's
Dan's Guessing
Dan's Correcting my answer
Ada's

Yvonne's

Congratulations, Dan!

• The Easter show is approaching. If you want to go, you can plan your day trip beforehand by visiting their website, Easter Show. And if you have time, you can do this worksheet from last year: Easter Show by one of our teachers (Nadia).
  
• Splendid Speaking is a podcasting site form the UK. Its master (the person who publishes it) has asked me permission to publish a link to our Let's Talk podcasting site, so that his students can contact us. I said yes. It's a great way for ESL students to communicate with one another across the world. It will help you improve your listening and speaking skills tremendously!

Do you know the names of these flowers? Which one is an Australian native?

State elections over

Balmain electoral polling booth on 24th March 2007

Last Saturday were the state elections. Australians went to their local polling booths to exercise their right and responsibility as citizens. Can you find anything in this picture that makes you say something about our electoral system? (write in your blogs)
























Today's work:

• Forum: Last week's discussion about multiculturalism to celebrate Harmony Day
  
• Write an email to William's class in New Zealand and send it.
  
• Go to Let's Talk, a website where we will publish your radio programs. Listen to Marielle's first radio program and the introductory Semester 2 Students as examples of what you can do. Today we will work on our introductions, either individually or in pairs. Later on we will start working on your radio programs.
  
• Recording your voice: I will show you how to use Audacity to record your voice onto the computer. You can record a brief introduction of yourself and/or a classmate. On the right sidebar there is a permanent link to a tutorial, in case you need to read it when you try doing it at home.
  

Work to do later or at home:

• Time4English: Go to Grammar Book,letter T and do the tense exercises that follow the blue ones you did last week: Tense - Future - will & going to, Tense - Past continuous, Tense - Present perfect
• I'm going to give you a table with all the work that you should have on your blogs. You can start working on catching up with your blog portfolio!

What's on: Information about interesting things in Sydney, Kogarah, etc

• Sydney in the dark:Earth Hour. What is it? How can you take part in it? What do you think about it? Are you going to do it? You can write a post about this.

Games: Exotic country.Many of you have had very interesting answers. Nobody from this class has got the correct country yet. These are the countries that are not correct: Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Belize, China, North America, Australia, or Mexico. The continent Africa is not correct either. I'll give you a final clue: The name of this country is related to the name of the person who got to that part of the world in 1492.


If you want to relax and improve your mouse skills, you can do these exercises on Mouse skills. I've placed a permanent How tos link on the right sidebar.